Search This Blog

Nov 25, 2016

Narratives of Slavery in Late Ottoman Egypt

The epithet "abid," Arabic for "slave," still follows those with dark skin as they move around today's Cairo. The word and its negative connotations, however, have a long history. In this episode, Professor Eve Troutt Powell explores this history by tracing the many lives of slaves and slavery in late Ottoman Egypt. She draws on the narratives of Ottoman Egyptian elites, Sudanese slave traders, and slaves themselves to show how the practice of owning people with dark skin shaped a regional Ottoman-Egyptian-Sudanese economy, gendered patterns of elite household life, and prominent forms of textual and visual culture. She reads representations of slavery and slaves' lives in the late nineteenth century to show how practices of Egyptian and Sudanese slave trading and owning, developed far from the decks of Atlantic slavers, nevertheless produced their own forms of racist thinking that have persisted into the present in Egypt as elsewhere.

Susanna Ferguson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Middle Eastern History at Columbia University. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled "Tracing Tarbiya: Women, Gender and Childrearing in Egypt and Lebanon, 1865-1939."

Episodes of 2017

Ottoman History Podcast is a
noncommerical website intended for educational use. Anyone is welcome to use and reproduce our contentwith proper attribution under the terms of noncommercial fair use
within the classroom setting or on other educational websites. All third-party
content is used either with express permission or under the terms of fair use. Our page and podcasts
contain no advertising and our website receives no revenue. Commercial use of our material is strictly prohibited,
as it violates not only our noncommercial commitment but also the rights of
third-party content owners.

We
make efforts to completely cite all secondary sources employed in the
making of our episodes and properly attribute third-party content such
as images from the web. If you feel that your material has been improperly used or
incorrectly attributed on our site, please do not hesitate to contact
us.